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MUMBAI: For the 6,000-plus MBAs graduating from India's top 21 B-schools, the 2014 placement season brought some much-needed relief after a muted couple of years of fewer offers and disappointing placements.

Better times were back on campus as traditional big-ticket recruiters rubbed shoulders with new-age e-commerce players and at least two companies notched up over a 100 hires each.

Cognizant, which aced the India's top recruiters list last year, snagged the numero uno position once again. The company, which has one MBA for every 20-25 tech professionals, said it has hired over 500 MBA students from the 2014 graduating batch across B-schools in India, North America, Europe and APAC. Over the last three years, it has hired more than 200 MBAs every year.

"We continue to see strong requirements of MBAs from premier B-schools as their contribution across lines of business has been significant," says James Lennox, chief people officer, Cognizant. "We believe that analytical problem-solving skills are inherent in MBAs."

Cognizant Business Consulting, the consulting business, is the biggest recruiter of management graduates. It also hires MBA talent for several groups within its emerging business accelerator businesses, for its business process services practice as well as for corporate finance.

To make its recruitment process more robust, Cognizant used multiple screening tools and processes, including video interviews.

This year, ICICI Bank and Deloitte, two constants on the list over the previous editions, made it to the number 2 and 3 positions, respectively.

Investment banking major Goldman Sachs ramped up MBA hiring by 17% across divisions including investment banking, global investment research, investment management, finance, securities and human capital management. Women accounted for 28% of the full-time offers. "We work closely with business school partners to identify high-potential female talent as part of our efforts to increase workplace diversity," said Bunty Bohra, CEO, Goldman Sachs Services in India.

Naveen Narayanan, global head, talent acquisition of HCL Technologies, which reentered the top 10 list after a one-year gap says the company visited some 40-odd campuses to hire across three categories. While it hires global engagement managers from the top-ofthe-league B-schools including IIM-A, IIM-B, IIM-C, and XLRI, senior management trainees are recruited from other leading schools including IIFT, IIM-K and IIM- Trichy. It also hires management trainees to support projects in various delivery, sales enabling, and support roles.

Other recruiters like Reliance Industries, which made its debut on the list this time at No. 8, said that this year it had its largest contingent of management trainees join from premier business campuses across the country.

"We are at the mid-point of the largest investment programme ever at Reliance. With such significant plans, it is only imperative that we make significant investments in the talent space," said RIL chief human resources officer Prabir Jha. Earlier in June, at RIL's AGM, Mukesh Ambani had announced plans of investing more than `1.8 lakh crore (about $30 billion) across its businesses over three years.

"Almost all businesses and groups at RIL have the need for management graduates in some capacity or the other. This is also the essence and motivation of being a part of a diversified group like Reliance in which opportunities cut across industries as part of our different businesses," added Jha.

The explosion of e-commerce and the resultant hiring it entails also paved the way for the entry of two giants — one domestic and one foreign — on the list. Rivals Flipkart and Amazon tied for the 9th place based on campuses surveyed, both driven by an aggressive focus on hiring.

"We have grown 100x in the last three years and we don't see any signs of slowing down. As business scales up it's only natural that we will look at expanding our talent pool to support this growth," said Mekin Maheshwari, CPO, Flipkart.

Flipkart hires more from India's top B-school as it feels that students from these colleges fit in better with the high-growth and fast-paced environment. MBAs are absorbed across all functions like finance, supply chain, retail, marketing, HR, IT and customer support.

For Amazon India, B-school engagement has seen an exponential rise in the last two years with an average 45-50% increase in intake as compared to 2012-13. Students were hired for operations leadership roles, category management, product management, business development, HR, finance, among others.

"We look at students who come with some pre-MBA work experience as that helps us in a faster ramp-up once they start working with us," said Raj Raghavan, director HR, Amazon India.

"Our B-school engagements are based on identifying and hiring potential leaders from campuses.

Over the past four years our campus strategy and engagements have evolved and have focused towards empowering, educating and enabling students towards a fruitful career in Amazon," he added.